Painting: Lochinvar’s Return

At dinner before the museum opening, Director of Collections Alfred Barr tapped his wine glass for attention, rose to reminisce: “I think I first heard the name of Bob Motherwell back in the 1940’s from the surrealists, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, André Breton. And to hear them describe him, he was then like some young Lochinvar come out of the west.” Last week Robert Motherwell went back in triumph to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art to receive its greatest accolade: a one-man show, with 87 canvases, collages and drawings, including two outsize abstract canvases never shown before (see color).

It turned out to be a great occasion for mutual admiration. “I was born for modern art and it for me,” said Motherwell. For their part, Modern Museum officials happily recalled that the MMA had bought one Motherwell collage, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, in 1943, a year before his first one-man show, when the artist had been painting for only three years. The Modern Museum has kept a close watch on Motherwell ever since; today it owns six of his works.

Modern Blossom. By all the logic of art movements, the dinner should have been a wake. Abstract expressionism has been declared dead; pop and op are up. Yet here was an artist who had painted along with Pollock, Kline, Gottlieb and DeKooning, who had been among the most articulate defenders of the faith and who was now at last having his big moment. On hand for the occasion were such oldtimers as Mark Rothko and Philip Guston to give Motherwell, now 50, a bear hug for his success.

As Motherwell sees it, the really big struggle was back in 1944-54, when the battle for abstract art hung in the balance: “I suppose most of us felt that our passionate allegiance was not to American art or to any national act, but that there was such a thing as modern art; that it was essentially international in character, that it was the greatest painting adventure of our time, that we wished to plant it here, that it would blossom in its own way.” The walls were breached when abstract expressionism took roots as the first U.S. art movement with international repercussions. “Since then,” he muses, “I and my colleagues have been having our own odyssey, returning to our own Penelopes and Ithacas.”

First Lesson. “I am a freak,” Motherwell confesses. “I didn’t start painting seriously until I was 25.” The son of a banker, Motherwell was born in Washington, went to Stanford, Harvard Graduate School, the University of Grenoble, and Oxford in pursuit of a respectable Ph.D. before showing up to study with Art Historian Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. In the face of hardheaded parental disapproval, he had been sketching since childhood. When he showed Schapiro his work, the Columbia scholar sent him along for criticism to the lively circle of French surrealists who had been driven by Hitler to take refuge in the U.S. Motherwell’s scholarship and knowledge of French poetry earned the surrealists’ admiration; his work attracted Patroness Peggy Guggenheim, then married to Top Surrealist Max Ernst. She promptly proceeded to make him the youngest painter in her stable, which included Pollock, William Baziotes and Clyfford Still.

Motherwell proved a fast learner. The great lesson “of what modern art is all about,” he believes, was first stated by French Symbolist Poet Stéphane Mallarmé in 1864: “Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces.” For the young Motherwell, the easiest way to set this down was by combining oil, gouache and pieces of torn paper. Today his elegantly signed collages—which often combine pieces of French Gauloises cigarette packages, an envelope from his English bookseller or a football ticket—sell for from $3,500 to $5,500, are considered by connoisseurs the most elegant in the medium.

Gay with Banners. Motherwell followed the surrealists’ injunction to take doodling seriously as a way of tapping subconscious images—”only the doodling is done on the scale of the Sistine Chapel, not of the telephone pad.” To illustrate a friend’s poem in 1948, he made his most haunting “doodle”: three powerful vertical bars with three hard-pressed black ovoid forms caught between each. They could have been prisoners trapped behind bars or, as Modern Museum Curator Frank O’Hara suggests, “bulls’ tails and testicles hung side by side on the wall of the arena after the fight.” Motherwell titled it Elegy to the Spanish Republic, and has obsessively used the visual metaphor 102 times in the intervening 17 years, even adapting it to the Irish Rebellion, until it has become his trademark. For the Modern’s show, five Elegies, ranging up to 20 ft. in length, were lined up side by side along one wall, an ominous but noble salute to life and death in the Spanish Republic.

“We rush toward death,” Motherwell says; but the trip obviously has its pleasures. Now married to his third wife, Painter Helen Frankenthaler, Motherwell commands top prices ($25,000-$30,000) for his large oils, is a gourmet who owns a Manhattan townhouse, vacations in Venice and Greece. And even in his large-scale (7 ft. by 17 ft.) treatment of such serious subjects as Dublin’s Easter Rebellion, the black bars of the Elegies now seem to have opened and the middle field made gay with banner forms. For his next commission, a mural in the Gropius-designed John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Office Building in Boston, the bars will hopefully be burst even farther asunder. Whatever emerges, Motherwell will not lack for space: the mural will cover 224 sq. ft., looming high over the lobby.